This is not the wank you're looking for.
I want to say something about the F word. You know the one I mean: Feminism. Oh, has there ever been a term more misused and misunderstood than Feminism? How often do you hear things like “Feminism is where men suck and women refuse to shave their legs, right?” and most recently “Feminism means being loud and bitchy and eviscerating people for
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What is very interesting is that for me, I find so much more Feminist debate and openness to the discussion in my online experience than I do in my real life. With my RL friends, Feminism is boring and a given and not something that needs to be continually explored and analyzed. And who has time for the abstract when there are so many other pressing matters? So, I got tired of beating my head against a wall there and decided to jump in here instead, where I know you guys are engaged and so much smarter than me with so many of these topics. I just...want to talk about it! :)
And yes, the issue of people feeling like we are saying they are bad or persecuting them somehow... It's got to be one of the major roadblocks, right? Because I know how I feel every time I uncover some hidden misogyny in myself and it HURTS and is pretty embarrassing and I can understand deciding to not poke that monster rather than deal with all these unpleasant feelings. But that's just not me. I guess all we can do is hold the door open and offer to lend our tools to anyone who might wander in our direction. God, I am abusing metaphors to death today. ;)
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See, for me? The ONLY feminism discussion I ever hear or can participate in is online. My offline friends and family have no interest in discussing it, and if I bring it up I get The Eye. I was totally introduced to the concepts and ideas online. Not that I didn't have a healthy interest in it before the internet, but I had no circle of peers to really direct me. So while offline life is frustrating, it's the online people who are more frustrating because they have everything at their fingertips and still refuse to see.
I know that once I started looking at feminism and applying it to myself, and once I started to change, that all those uninteresting female characters that I hated... suddenly became much more palatable. In fact, I started to love them a lot. Hardly coincidence, you know?
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And that's the magic, right? We always talk about how hard Feminism is, but there are some pretty awesome rewards too. :)
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